Island War Day 3

I decided to put some work into creating an editor that I can
later use for building the levels and perhaps even include with my game.
XNA gave me a hard time getting it to work inside a Windows.Forms
application and I had to rewrite several of the XNA classes until I had
a properly working XNA UserControl allowing me to render my game world
inside the editor window.

Of course, the editor had to look modern and neat, with dockable panels
and color gradients all over the place. As it turned out, there is no
built-in solution for docking windows in the .NET Framework, so, given my
plans to release the game’s source code, I had to find a solution that was
both free and provided a decent user experience.

There’s one such library on SourceForge which looks very promising and
provides the same look and feel the Visual Studio 2005 IDE has:
DockPanelSuite.
I ran into some issues with RC2, so I decided against it for the time being.
When 1.0 goes final before my game is shipped, I’ll definitely will go back
to this one as its by far the most promising component of this kind.

This brought me to
DockingLibrary
provided by a kind developer which goes under the name Darwen. It includes
full source code, looks still good on Windows Vista and doesn’t even have
a license to begin with.

There’s another free docking library:
Docking Windows.
However, it doesn’t include source code, so I could not assess its quality.